This invention relates to enhancing aural communication and conversational interaction among and between persons in social situations, such as those surrounding a table.
Participants sitting or arrayed around a table frequently have trouble hearing and conversing with other participants beyond the most nearby neighbors seated to either side. Background noise due to other speakers in the room, and room reverberations and various additional external sources conspire to drown out normal speech. Lower-frequency sounds (or speech components) predominantly mask higher frequency sounds and speech, reducing intelligibility. Older participants are particularly affected as their ability to hear higher frequency sounds is often diminished or lost. One aspect of such an environment is the “cocktail party effect,” wherein a group of talkers instinctively raise their individual acoustic outputs above normal conversational levels in order to overcome the perceived background level, which is often dominated by reverberant sound. Another aspect of the cocktail party effect is the ability of listeners to focus in on a particular talker in the presence of background sound.
A number of previous techniques have attempted to remedy various shortcomings. One previous technique involves feeding suitably and multiply delayed versions of an electronic acoustic signal to two spaced loudspeakers to produce the illusion to a listener that the sounds emanate from a third, “phantom” location. The listener is assumed to be on a line perpendicular to the midpoint between the spaced loudspeakers to face that midpoint. Another previous technique teaches reproducing a stereophonic signal pair through a pair of spaced loudspeakers that simulate a pair of widely-spaced virtual or phantom loudspeakers placed at or near the optimum locations for conventionally spaced stereo loudspeakers. The spaced loudspeakers may be surprisingly close together, which relaxes accuracy requirements on knowing a listeners head position. Several other previous techniques involve parametric loudspeakers, face and facial feature detection and tracking, and techniques using two cameras to locate and track a single listener's head using triangulation and skin color for the purpose of enhancing virtual stereophonic sound reproduction.
None of the previous techniques suitably address the problems discussed above. The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.